Tasks planner

The rplan software is installed on the Altix computer. This tool allows definition of the machine work schedule, on a time range, week, month, quarter, under the form of resources allocations. Each authorised user may be given one or more CPU x time allocation slots

Slots scheduling is made by an administrator on a negociations basis (the Thursday morning meeting) Each slots gets exclusive ownership for its owner user who will be the only authorised person to submit jobs in that slot.

The current schedule is available online, see Time allocations.

Contents

• Program overview

• Tasks submission

• Abbreviated commands

• Tasks management

• Slots management

• Good slots usage

• The rwrap tasks launcher

Program overview

The tasks manager is made of one single program, rplan :

rplan  [arguments]

The program features an online help about commands, with the most usual options :

rplan help

or a contextual help, command specific, giving the list of all options. E.g. :

rplan help submit
rplan help slots

NB: the rplan help system is not just some text output but is generated by a code module using the internal tables of the program command line parser. Thus this help is correct and exhaustive. As the present web documentation is written and maintained by hand, it can't be certified errors free. Should this document and the program online help disagree, the online help is the reference.

The rplan program still uses the PBS queue manager, but some pbs commands should no longer be used (they have been deactivated). This concerns theqsub, qhold, qrls commands. Instead, rplan equivalents should be user, or the abbreviated commands.

Tasks submission

Script submission

The most simple cript submission is :

rplan submit 

or :

rplan sub 

Options

Only one submission option is recognised and processed by rplan, it's a slot number specification. By default, rplan will queue the job into the first possible slot, owned by the current user and of suited size (number of CPUs, time size).

Should a user own several slots, it will be possible to specify the proper one, e.g. :

rplan submit -s 1234